An Unseemly Man, an Unlikely Hero: Larry Flynt Fights On

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An Unseemly Man, an Unlikely Hero: Larry Flynt Fights On

Larry Flynt is back. And with the Supreme Court close to taking up the issue of free speech on the Net, he may be around for a good while.

This month, a Flynt biopic is hitting the marquees while his autobiography, An Unseemly Man, hits bookshelves. And whether you see him as porn peddler or free-speech champion, you may be seeing even more of him in coming months: In an interview with Wired News, Flynt said there's a "good possibility" he'll fight the same free-speech battle for cyberspace that he did in print media in a landmark libel case in the 1980s.

"The Communications Indecency [sic] Act bothers me a great deal because they didn't even follow any of the existing Supreme Court guidelines on obscenity," Flynt said. "You could send an erotic email to your girlfriend. And if she had a scanner, she could even send you a nude photograph of her. Under these guidelines, that can be prosecuted. I think it's frightening."

Not only is Flynt's Hustler online, but Flynt says its readership has grown 500 percent in the past year while porn magazine circulations, in general, are declining. Not only could the CDA kill Flynt's new cash cow (the online Hustler is subscriber-driven), it may also undo some of the standards for free speech that the Supreme Court has established - some of them in a case involving Flynt.

In 1988, Flynt won a five-year libel case brought by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, who charged that a satirical ad suggesting Falwell's first sexual experience happened with his mother in an outhouse was libelous. The high court sided with Flynt, writing that "the fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it." The ruling has strengthened the First Amendment far beyond Flynt's publishing empire.

But Flynt, who once said he devoted his life "to the cause of civil liberties and civil rights for all mankind in an effort to bring about peace on earth," says there should be ways to keep sexually explicit materials from children. "At the same time, I'm concerned about children, but that's a parent's responsibility," he said. "I've never said that children should be able to read or see anything they want to."

The fight to preserve the First Amendment on the Net has allied Flynt - a factory worker turned sailor turned strip-club owner turned porn publishing magnate - with other Net activists, who have entirely different pedigrees. Still, few in cyberspace have done as much as Flynt to secure free speech rights and some openly consider him a hero to the cause, a title that Flynt brushes aside.

"For the first time in my life recently I got referred to as a hero once or twice and I felt very uncomfortable with that because I feel a hero is often the result of a final act committed by a coward," Flynt said. "If you could lift some of those boys' faces out of the mud in Vietnam and ask them if they had it to do all over again would they still be willing to give their lives for it, I think many of their answers would be the same as mine: 'I wouldn't give my life for anything or anyone.'"